A ransomware attack hit SMP Health in 2021 and halted the hospital’s ability to submit claims to insurers, Medicare or Medicaid for months, sending it into a financial spiral.
Quote by Health-ISAC Chief Security Officer, Errol Weiss in NBC News:
“There are countless examples of small businesses that have gone bankrupt following ransomware attacks as they were unable to restore their systems or afford to pay to get back up and running,” Errol Weiss, the chief security officer for Health-ISAC, a nonprofit group that shares cyberthreat information with hospitals, said in an email. “It’s tragic that we can now count a hospital in this statistic.”
An Illinois hospital will shutter its doors this week in part because of a devastating cyberattack, which experts say makes it the first hospital to publicly link criminal hackers to its closure.
St. Margaret’s Health in Spring Valley will close Friday, said Linda Burt, the hospital’s vice president of quality and community services.
Suzanne Stahl, the chair of SMP Health, the hospital’s parent organization, said last month that the hospital was planning to close this year. “Due to a number of factors, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the cyberattack on the computer system of St. Margaret’s Health, and a shortage of staff, it has become impossible to sustain our ministry,” she said in a Facebook video.
Ransomware attacks — in which criminal hackers remotely cripple an organization’s computers and demand an extortion payment — have plagued U.S. health care since 2016, said Allan Liska, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Data collected by Liska and his team showed at least 300 documented attacks a year on American health care facilities since 2020. This year is on pace to match that.
Read the full article in NBC News here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/illinois-hospital-links-closure-ransomware-attack-rcna85983